 An Eccles cake is a small, round cake filled with currants and made from puff pastry with butter and topped with demerara sugar.
Name and origin
Eccles cakes are named after the English town of Eccles, in Salford. It is not known who invented the recipe, but James Birch is credited with being the first person to sell Eccles cakes on a commercial basis, which he sold from his shop at the corner of Vicarage Road and St Mary’s Road (now known as Church Street) in the town centre, in 1793.
Nicknames for the Eccles cake include Squashed Fly Cake and Fly Cake or even a Fly's Graveyard, owing to the appearance of the currants that it contains.
Similar pastries
The Garibaldi biscuit is a smaller, drier cousin, and is also referred to as a Fly Cake and related terms.
The Chorley cake (from the town of Chorley in Lancashire) is flatter in appearance, is made with
short crust pastry rather than flakey pastry and is devoid of sugar topping.
Banbury cakes are an oval shaped cake from the town of Banbury.
Garibaldi biscuit
The Garibaldi biscuit consists of currants squashed between two thin, rectangular biscuits - a currant sandwich. In this respect, it has elements common with its larger, flaky pastry cousin, the Eccles Cake.
Popular with British consumers as a snack for nearly 150 years, the Garibaldi biscuit is conventionally consumed with a beverage such as tea or coffee, into which it may be dunked in informal social settings. The biscuits also exist under different names in other countries including New Zealand.
Appearance - When bought in supermarkets in the UK (under several brands, including own label, all remarkably similar), Garibaldi biscuits usually come in four strips of five biscuits each. They have a golden brown, glazed exterior appearance and a moderately sweet pastry, but their defining characteristic is the generous layer of squashed fruit which gives rise to the colloquial names by which dysphemically-inclined consumers know them: fly sandwiches, fly cemeteries, dead fly biscuits or squashed fly biscuits, because the squashed fruit resemble squashed flies.
History - The Garibaldi biscuit was named after Giuseppe Garibaldi, an Italian general and leader of the fight to unify Italy, who made a popular visit to Tynemouth in England in 1854. It was first manufactured by the Bermondsey biscuit company Peek Freans in 1861 following the recruitment of one of the great biscuit makers of Scotland, John Carr. In the United States, the Sunshine Biscuit Company for many years made a popular version of the Garibaldi with raisins which it called "Golden Fruit". Sunshine was bought out by the Keebler Company which briefly expanded the line to include versions filled with other fruits, but ultimately killed the product entirely.
Chorley cake
Chorley cakes are flattened, fruit-filled pastry cakes, traditionally associated with the town of Chorley in Lancashire, England. They are a close relative of the more widely known Eccles cake, but have some significant differences. The Chorley cake is significantly less sweet than its Eccles cousin, and is commonly eaten with a scraping of butter on top, and perhaps a slice of Lancashire cheese on the side. A Chorley cake is made using currants, sandwiched between two layers of unsweetened
short crust pastry. As with any regional food, every household has its own individual variations, and so it is not uncommon to see some sugar added to the fruit, or sweeter raisins or sultanas used. These sweeter varieties are sometimes referred to as "snap".
Also related to the Chorley cake is East Lancashire's "Sad Cake", made to a similar recipe. It was found in the Darwen, Blackburn, Burnley, Nelson and Padiham areas and throughout the Rossendale area. Sad cake is often up to 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter, as opposed to the Chorley cake being only around 3 or 3.5 inches (8 or 9 cm) and is made by rolling out the pastry and dropping raisins and or currants evenly over the pastry then folding in on several sides and then rolling out again to the required size, usually round but can be square. It was then cut into triangular sections similar to a sponge cake section and was a regular addition in a working man's lunch box (the whole meal was known as Bagging, snap or packing). The sad cake was a filler for eating either after one's sandwiches or as a separate tea break snack during the working day in the Cotton mills and coal mines of Lancashire. A spread of margarine, butter or even jam was placed on top. It may be eaten with sandwiches of jam and crumbly soft Lancashire cheese. Locals often refer to Chorley Cake as Fly Pie.
Chorley cake street fair - The October "Chorley Cake Street Fair", restarted in 1995, promotes the cakes, with a competition for local bakers to produce the largest ever Chorley cake.
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Chocolate Cake
